1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to storage and manipulation of digital content, and more specifically, to methods of augmenting the metadata of existing videos or other digital objects.
2. Background of the Invention
Video hosting services, such as YOUTUBE™, have become an increasingly popular way of sharing and viewing digital videos, with users contributing tens of millions of videos each year. Accurate labeling of a video is of great value in such systems, permitting users to search for videos corresponding to given labels, the video hosting service itself to train classifiers for video concepts using the label metadata, and the like.
Unfortunately, the user-supplied label metadata is in many cases incomplete or inaccurate. For example, a user submitting a video might make unintentional errors such as misspellings when supplying label metadata in association with the video, or might fail to make the effort to provide much or any descriptive textual metadata. A user submitting a video might also intentionally provide false label metadata, e.g. as “spam” to induce other users to view the video. Thus, a user searching for a video representing a particular concept might fail to find a relevant video because it lacked a description of the concept within its metadata, or might find a non-relevant video falsely labeled as representing the concept. In either case, the quality of the user's experience is significantly reduced.